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Under The Hood (Jade Cocoon 2)
PLEASE NOTE: This is an important and WIP page, please do not randomly edit or change. If you want to contribute information, please comment and discuss here first or contact Flossome, CocoonMasterInity or Chimera-gui if needs be. Thank you :) In this page, all data collected and understood over two years will be listed here, with more information being added in the near future. There will be information on the data of Divine Beasts, moves and abilities, just to name a couple of aspects of the game. All data has been collected from these files: SLUS_203.09, SLES_507.35, or SLPS_250.54, which can be copied straight from the American, European, and Japanese CD-ROMs, respectively. Move Data This section will explain in great detail the data of the moves in Jade Cocoon 2 and how they work. How a move actually works: Here, we will be looking at how the coding translates into a move in the game. For an example, let's take a look at the A Rank Fire spell, Agniagna: The first five lines of every move consist of its name, which has a limit of 20 characters only, and the lines typically look like this in the game code: # 005030C0 696E6741 # 005030C4 616E6761 # 005030C8 00000000 # 005030CC 00000000 # 00503040 00000000 For Agniagna, as you can see, the third, fourth, and fifth lines of code are unused (nop command) as the move only has 8 characters within it. Genki had to limit themselves to at least 12 characters because the name windows are relatively small but take up portions of the screen, even for the PS2's native resolution. The longest names in the game for moves are Water Barrier and Psycho Snatch. Also notice is that if you look at the move in a hex editor, the name is actually written in reverse hexadecimal, meaning that the game reads each line with hex numbers written in reverse, but allocates it to the correct spot after analyzing the move. The next three lines determine a few things, and this only applies to certain moves, for example, Mitrea: # 005002D4 0000000A # 005002D8 00000008 # 005002DC 0000000C The first lines of Mitrea that show real significance are these first three lines. The first line determines whether it's a Magic spell or a Skill, which calls either the Strength or Wisdom stat to come into play. The second line determines where the attack is being aimed; the 8 represents the user's whole BeastAmulet. The third line represents the "damage type", but in this case, since Mitrea isn't a damaging move, it doesn't apply here. However, with other moves like Soldote and Water Barrier, the 3 in the last line listed above represents hitting the entire side of the enemy's BeastAmulet. The next four lines are repeated twice more; these are the effects in battle that a move has. Keeping Mitrea here as an example, here is the effect that Mitrea gets in the game's code: # 005002E0 0000000E # 005002E4 00000003 # 005002E8 000000FF # 005002EC 00000032 The first line is the actual effect that is being applied to targets; here, it's Mitrea, the boosting of all stats. Genki probably coded Mitrea like this so they wouldn't have to fill the game with so much data in programming individual effects to raise attacking, defending, and speed stats to fill this one move. The second line is the duration of the effect, which in Mitrea's case is three turns (which includes the turn in which it was cast, so really you only get two turns with it before it wears off). The third line is the rate at which the effect will take place. In Mitrea's case, it will always take place upon casting, hence the "FF" value. When programming moves like Poison Storm though, there needs to be a chance at whether or not you'll be poisoned, hence Poison Storm's 50% chance to be poisoned upon contact. Anyway, the last line represents how much the effect will affect your beasts. In this case, Mitrea only raises all stats by 50%, hence the 32 value. But, for effective as Mitrea can be for in a pinch, this is a perfect value to raise all stats by, considering how over-powering any edits to Mitrea or any Beasts using Mitrea would be (like the Kalma beasts and Lilith's minions). As stated before, the effects are repeated twice more, for a grand total of up to three different effects that each move can have. After the three effects though, is where it gets interesting. This section of 14 lines is actually where damage calculations go from the attacking and defending beasts. Let's put a scenario on the table; # 005034A8 00000000 # 005034AC 00000000 # 005034B0 00000000 # 005034B4 00000000 # 005034B8 00000064 # 005034BC 00000000 # 005034C0 00000000 # 005034C4 00000000 # 005034C8 00000000 # 005034CC 00000000 # 005034D0 00000000 # 005034D4 00000000 # 005034D8 00000064 # 005034DC 00000000 This is the move data for the move Soldote. Since it is a magic attack, it would only make sense to have the damage calculation take the attacker's Wisdom stat, pit it with the defender's Spirit stat, and mish-mash it with the actual damage with the move in a still-unknown formula, to calculate damage to the defending side/beast. These are what the two respective boldfaced lines represent; the attacker's Wisdom stat and the defender's Spirit stat. The first seven lines of these 14 represent the attacker's stats (in this case, line 5 for the attacker's Wisdom) and which of them the damage calculation formula should draw from, and the last seven lines are what the formula should draw from the defender's stats (also in this case, line 13 for the defender's Spirit). And now, we get to the final sections of the move data. For this example, let's go out with a bang, literally, and examine Lilith's signature move, Dark Impact. For Dark Impact, we all know it's a Spell that Lilith can cast, but most skill moves will have a line of code before the accuracy of the move that would look like this: 00506450 0000000A For Skills, it determines the chance for a critical hit against a single attacker. Anyway, back to the last lines of code; this section is going to be a little lengthy; # 00506454 000000FF # 00506458 0000001B # 0050645C 00000001 # 00506460 00000050 # 00506464 00679CC0 # 00506468 00679CC0 # 0050646C 0000000B # 00506470 00000000 # 00506474 00000005 # 00506478 00020003 # 0050647C 0000004D So to light the fuse, we first have the accuracy of the move. If it's a spell, it will ALWAYS be FF, unless Genki really wanted this to be more like Pokemon, than they could've introduced more accuracy values to every move. Digression aside, next we have the damage value that is input into an as-of-now not-yet-known damage formula, but the value translates into decimal as 27 from 1B. This may not seem like much, but when your monsters have high stats, it probably wouldn't even matter. Just look at Lilith for an example. The next line is a determination of magic against the enemy, signified by the 1 value. Skills would have something totally different. After that is the MP consumption, of which this move consumes 80 MP just to cast, which is a seriously high value for normal beasts, but not for Lilith, as she has over 5000 MP. In between the damage calculation and MP cost is the flag that determines whether it's a skill or a magic attack. If you happen to not change this line, it could break magic attacks quite badly, resulting in a softlock of your game. After the MP cost would be a pointer to a move description; since this isn't a move you can readily receive in the game, Genki decided to leave this first line of the move description blank, as with Water Barrier, Larvalize, Seal, and all the dummied-out moves. More on those later. The second line, for every other move, is left blank because of screen limitations. The next line after the description codes is where the attack is being aimed; if at the entire BeastAmulet, like Dark Impact, then it would be the B value. Magics aimed at individual beasts have the value of D (most of the time, and this also applies to skills as well). The next line is the call code to determine whether or not the monster uses its Skill or Magic animations, which branch off into their own scripts with camera angles included. If you don't change this line as well with the flag mentioned above, then it can help further in softlocking your game. The line after that determines the rank of the skill, which loosely determines how powerful the move is. It runs through E Rank (value 0) to S Rank (value 5). The next line of code determines the element of the move being used (which, if we're being perfectly honest here, Dark Impact really should be classified as a neutral move, because it's powerful enough as it is). The final line of code determines what move animation to use. In this case, the value is 4D, which activates the Dark Impact battle effect, with all of its included sound effects. Move List This sub-section is a list of every single move in the game according to its hexadecimal value and organised as such. Moves listed as dummied are in-line with the original release of the game, i.e., not using any patches by hunkster2, etc. Any such moves that are dummied out or stand out from the rest of this table will have the "Dummied?" and "Working?" columns apply to them. (*): "Attack", as many players of the game know already, is a neutral move that is used when a Divine Beast runs out of MP, and stays that way until MP's are recovered. The strange thing is, that corresponding to the Divine Beast's element, it will use the "Attack" set in the 'opposite' element. As an example, a Tamatoch will get pointed to the "Attack" move set in the Water section, and a Spikebee will get pointed to the "Attack" move set in the Earth section. Ability Data This section will give detailed information about abilities in the game. Plus, information on abilities that didn't make it into the game, called "dummied-out abilities". There are more dummied-out abilities than moves in this game, a few of which are really interesting. How Abilities work In the game, abilities are meant to either help, or hinder your beasts in different forms. There are abilities that can raise your stats, or make you take more damage from Poison, or even keep your beast in it's Larval stage. They'll all be listed, and their mechanics will be shown down below. As with moves, the first five lines of any ability code begins with a name. Unlike moves though, abilities get one extra line of code to use for a name, which looks like this: 00506480 55205048 00506484 00312070 00506488 00000000 0050646C 00000000 00506470 00000000 That is the name code for the ability HP Up 1. Due to limitations in characters for the naming windows, names were limited to 12 or 13 characters. Meanwhile the line after the name has a value of 1; something that is not yet known, but it appears to be used in classifying it as an ability. The line after that determines the whole ability, the effect number. There are many different types of effects, many of which are dummied out, but they have a range of numbers to cover. For example, Strength Up 3 has an effect number of 2, which raises select stats by a certain percentage, determined later on in the code. The next three lines are mainly unimportant and shouldn't be messed with until more information is gathered. They look like this: 00508D9C 0000FFFF 00508DA0 00000000 00508DA4 000000FF The line afterward is the number of which the ability affects whatever it is. For example, Super Recover boosts the effectiveness of healing moves (except certain other moves) by 50%, hence its value of 32 in the game code. It looks like this: 00508B18 00000032 The next 19 lines of code are all resistances, and here they are in the order in which they are known: Critical Hits Magic Attacks Unknown Unknown Magma-esque Moves Unknown MP Damage Unknown Poisoning Stunning Confusion Sleeping Blindness Petrification Sudden Death Earth Water Fire Wind The next seven lines of codes are stats that correspond to the Stat Up abilities, like Strength Up 3, that were mentioned earlier. They are, in order: HP MP Strength Vitality Wisdom Spirit Speed There is one extra line after that, which is reserved specifically for the Genus Killer abilities. It would look like this: 00509000 00320001 However, due to intensive testing with these abilities, even changing their values, these abilities just do not work. The first section of the actual code represents the percentage of extra damage would get dealt to a beast whose Genus matched with the Killer ability. The second part of the code represents the Genus that needs to be identified by its hex number, and it goes in this order: 00 = Og 01 = Na 02 = Leif 03 = Ku 04 = Gara 05 = Slimy 06 = Drac 07 = Mau 08 = Bug 09 = Alco 0A = Kalma? Once the genus was identified, it would add on the extra damage. The next line is filler (as far as we know), and the last two lines of the entire code is a description. Once again, like moves, the second description code points to a blank description, and it happens for every ability. List of Abilities Here is a detailed list of all abilities in hexadecimal order, with their desired effect. Dummied abilities will get their own table below this one. (*): Experience gained or lowered by 10%. Dummied-Out Abilities These abilities were dummied out of the final product, but some Japanese translations are provided with these abilities. Below are these abilities and what their intended uses might have been. Some of these abilities don't work. All have been extensively tested. So far, only Metal Conversion, Serious, and Null Magic are the only abilities left out by Genki that actually fully function, but this is only due to the added mechanic of Chroming. As you can see, there are still a lot of abilities that need to be tested or researched some more. In regards to Metal Conversion, this ability causes chroming. However, it is also tied with the ability Serious, meaning that Serious does not need to be present when Metal Conversion is also in the user's ability repertoire. It may have been removed to be used solely as a secret feature for people to discover, much like Shiny Pokémon, though Chrome Divine Beast's are functionally different, whereas Shiny Pokémon aren't. In addition to Serious, Null Magic is another ability that is a side-effect of Metal Conversion. What sets it apart from Serious though, is the fact that Null Magic actually functions as an ability, as stated above. Below is picture proof and video proof of the event of Chroming: Category:Jade Cocoon 2